Half of California counties have zero full-time public defense investigators

Close to half of California's 58 counties employ zero full-time public defense investigators. In Mississippi, outside of murder cases, public defenders never hire investigators and have no time to investigate cases themselves. This means that 80% of criminal defendants — those too poor to hire private counsel — are routinely convicted without anyone ever investigating the charges against them. No one visits the crime scene. No one interviews alibi witnesses. No one checks whether the forensic evidence was processed correctly. The defendant's only 'investigation' is reading whatever the prosecution chose to disclose. This is not a resource constraint that affects case quality at the margins — it eliminates an entire phase of legal defense. It persists because investigator funding comes from the same budget as attorney salaries, and when forced to choose, offices hire more lawyers rather than investigators, creating a system of lawyers who can appear in court but cannot build a defense.